Franz Liszt Franz Liszt Location of death: Bayreuth, Germany Cause of death: Pneumonia Remains: Buried, Alter Friedhof, Bayreuth, Germany Gender: Male Nationality: Hungary Executive summary: Hungarian composer Hungarian pianist and composer, born on the 22nd of October 1811, at Raiding, in Hungary. His appeal to musicians was made in a threefold capacity, and we have, therefore, to deal with Liszt the unrivaled pianoforte virtuoso (1830-48); Liszt the conductor of the "music of the future" at Weimar, the teacher of Tausig, Bulow and a host of lesser pianists, the eloquent writer on music and musicians, the champion of Berlioz and Wagner (1848-61); and Liszt the prolific composer, who for some 35 years continued to put forth pianoforte pieces, songs, symphonic orchestral pieces, cantatas, masses, psalms and oratorios (1847-82).

As virtuoso he held his own for the entire period during which he chose to appear in public; but the militant conductor and prophet of Wagner had a hard time of it, and the composer's place is still in dispute. Liszt's father, a clerk to the agent of the Esterhazy estates and an amateur musician of some attainment, was Hungarian by birth and ancestry, his mother an Austrian-German. The boy's gifts attracted the attention of certain Hungarian magnates, who furnished 600 gulden annually for some years to enable him to study music at Vienna and Paris. At Vienna he had lessons in pianoforte playing from Carl Czerny of "Velocity" fame, and from Salieri in harmony and analysis of scores. In his eleventh year he began to play in public there, and Beethoven came to his second concert in April 1823. During the three years following he played in Paris, the French provinces and Switzerland, and paid three visits to England. In Paris he had composition lessons from Pa�r, and a six months' course of lessons in counterpoint from Reicha.

In the autumn of 1825 the handsome and fascinating enfant g�t� of the salons and ateliers -- "La Neuvi�me Merveille du monde" -- had the luck to get an operetta (Don Sancho) performed three times at the Acad�mie Royale. The score was accidentally destroyed by fire, but a set of studies � la Czerny and Cramer, belonging to 1826 and published at Marseilles as 12 �tudes, op. I, is extant, and shows remarkable precocity. After the death of his father in 1828 young Liszt led the life of a teacher of the pianoforte in Paris, got through a good deal of miscellaneous reading, and felt the influence of the religious, literary and political aspirations of the time. He attended the meetings of the Saint-Simonists, lent an ear to the romantic mysticism of P�re Enfantin and later to the teaching of Abb� Lamennais. He also played Beethoven and Weber in public -- a very courageous thing in those days.

The appearance of the violinist Niccolo Paganini in Paris, 1831, marks the starting point of the supreme eminence Liszt ultimately attained as a virtuoso. Paganini's marvellous technique inspired him to practice as no pianist had ever practiced before. He tried to find equivalents for Paganini's effects, transcribed his violin caprices for the piano, and perfected his own technique to an extraordinary degree. After Paganini he received a fresh impulse from the playing and the compositions of Chopin , who arrived in 1831, and yet another impulse of equal force from a performance of Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique, �pisode de la vie d'un artiste", in 1832. Liszt transcribed this work, and its influence ultimately led him to the composition of his "Po�mes symphoniques" and other examples of orchestral programme-music. From 1833 to 1848 -- when he gave up playing in public -- he was greeted with frantic applause as the prince of pianists.

Five years (1835-40) were spent in Switzerland and Italy, in semi-retirement in the company of Madame la comtesse d'Agoult ( George Sand 's friend and would-be rival, known in literary circles as "Daniel Stern", by whom Liszt had three children, one of them afterwards Frau Cosima Wagner): these years were devoted to further study in playing and composition, and were interrupted only by occasional appearances at Geneva, Milan, Florence and Rome, and by annual visits to Paris, when a famous contest with Thalberg took place in 1837. The enthusiasm aroused by Liszt's playing and his personality -- the two are inseparable -- reached a climax at Vienna and Budapest in 1839-40, when he received a patent of nobility from the emperor of Austria, and a sword of honor from the magnates of Hungary in the name of the nation. During the eight years following he was heard at all the principal centers -- including London, Leipzig, Berlin, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Constantinople, Lisbon and Madrid. He gained much money, and gave large sums in charity.

His munificence with regard to the Beethoven statue at Bonn made a great stir. The subscriptions having come in but sparsely, Liszt took the matter in hand, and the monument was completed at his expense, and unveiled at a musical festival conducted by Spohr and himself in 1845. In 1848 he settled at Weimar with Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein (d. 1887), and remained there until 1861. During this period he acted as conductor at court concerts and on special occasions at the theater, gave lessons to a number of pianists, wrote articles of permanent value on certain works of Berlioz and the early operas of Wagner, and produced those orchestral and choral pieces upon which his reputation as a composer mainly depends. His ambition to found a school of composers as well as a school of pianists met with complete success on the one hand and partial failure on the other. His efforts on behalf of Wagner, who was then an exile in Switzerland, culminated in the first performance of Lohengrin on the 28th of August 1850, before a special audience assembled from far and near.

Among the works produced for the first time or rehearsed with a view to the furtherance of musical art were Wagner's Tannh�user, Der fliegende Holl�nder, Das Liebesmahl der Apostel, and Eine Faust Overt�re, Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini, the Symphonic Fantastique, Harold en Italie, Rom�o et Juliette, La Damnation de Faust, and L'Enfance du Christ -- the last two conducted by the composer -- Schumann 's Genoveva, Paradise and the Peri, the music to Manfred and to Faust, Weber 's Euryanthe, Schubert 's Alfonso und Estrella, Raff's K�nig Alfred, Cornelius's Der Barbier von Baghdad and many more.

It was Liszt's habit to recommend novelties to the public by explanatory articles or essays, which were written in French (some for the Journal des d�bats and the Gazette musicale of Paris) and translated for the journals of Weimar and Leipzig -- thus his two masterpieces of sympathetic criticism, the essays Lohengrin et Tannh�user � Weimar and Harold en Italie, found many readers and proved very effective. They are now included, together with articles on Schumann and Schubert, and the elaborate and rather high-flown essays on Chopin and Des Boh�miens et de leur musique en Hongrie (the latter certainly, and the former probably, written in collaboration with Madame de Wittgenstein), in his Gesammelte Schriften (6 vols., Leipzig).

The compositions belonging to the period of his residence at Weimar comprise two pianoforte concertos, in E flat and in A, the "Todtentanz", the "Concerto path�tique" for two pianos, the solo sonata "An Robert Schumann", sundry "�tudes", fifteen "Rhapsodies Hongroises", twelve orchestral "Po�mes symphoniques", "Eine Faust Symphonie", and "Eine Symphonie zu Dante's Divina Cornmedia", the "13th Psalm" for tenor solo, chorus and orchestra, the choruses to Herder 's dramatic scenes "Prometheus", and the "Missa solennis" known as the "Graner Fest Messe." Liszt retired to Rome in 1861, and joined the Franciscan order in 1865.

From 1869 onwards Abb� Liszt divided his time between Rome and Weimar, where during the summer months he received pupils -- gratis as formerly -- and, from 1876 up to his death at Bayreuth on the 31st of July 1886, he also taught for several months every year at the Hungarian Conservatoire of Budapest. About Liszt's pianoforte technique in general it may be said that it derives its efficiency from the teaching of Czerny, who brought up his pupil on Mozart , a little Bach and Beethoven , a good deal of Clementi and Hummel, and a good deal of his (Czerny's) own work. Classicism in the shape of solid, respectable Hummel on the one hand, and Carl Czerny, a trifle flippant, perhaps, and inclined to appeal to the gallery, on the other, these gave the musical parentage of young Liszt. Then appears the Parisian Incroyable and grand seigneur -- "Monsieur Lits", as the Parisians called him.

Later, we find him imitating Paganini and Chopin, and at the same time making a really passionate and deep study of Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Berlioz. Thus gradually was formed the master of style -- whose command of the instrument was supreme, and who played like an inspired poet. Liszt's strange musical nature was long in maturing its fruits. At the pianoforte his achievements culminate in the two books of studies, twice rewritten, and finally published in 1852 as �tudes d'ex�cution transcendante, the �tudes de concert and the Paganini Studies; the two concertos and the Todtentanz, the Sonata in B minor, the Hungarian Rhapsodies and the fine transcriptions of Beethoven's symphonies (the 9th for two pianofortes as well as solo), and of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, and the symphony, Harold en Italie. In his orchestral pieces of Liszt appears -- next to Berlioz -- as the most conspicuous and most thorough-going representative of programme music, that is, instrumental music expressly contrived to illustrate in detail some poem or some succession of ideas or pictures.

It was Liszt's aim to bring about a direct alliance or amalgamation of instrumental music with poetry. To effect this he made use of the means of musical expression for purposes of illustration, and relied on points of support outside the pale of music proper. There is always danger of failure when an attempt is thus made to connect instrumental music with conceptions not in themselves musical, for the order of the ideas that serve as a programme is apt to interfere with the order which the musical exposition naturally assumes -- and the result in most cases is but an amalgam of irreconcilable materials. In pieces such as Liszt's "Po�mes symphoniques", Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne (1848-56), after a poem by Victor Hugo , and Die Ideale (1853-57), after a poem by Friedrich von Schiller , the hearer is bewildered by a series of startling orchestral effects which succeed one another apparently without rhyme or reason. The music does not conform to any sufficiently definite musical plan -- it is hardly intelligible as music without reference to the programme.

Liszt's masterpiece in orchestral music is the Dante Symphony (1847-55), the subject of which was particularly well suited to his temperament, and offered good chances for the display of his peculiar powers as a master of instrumental effect. By the side of it ranks the Faust Symphony (1854-57), in which the moods of Goethe 's characters -- Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles -- are depicted in three instrumental movements, with a chorus of male voices, supplying a kind of comment, by way of close. The method of presentation in both symphonies is by means of representative themes (Leitmotif), and their combination and interaction. Incidents of the poem or the play are illustrated or alluded to as may be convenient, and the exigencies of musical form are not unfrequently disregarded for the sake of special effects. Of the twelve Po�mes symphoniques, Orph�e is the most consistent from a musical point of view, and is exquisitely scored.

Melodious, effective, readily intelligible, with a dash of the commonplace, Les Pr�ludes, Tasso, Mazeppa and Fest-Kl�nge bid for popularity. In these pieces, as in almost every production of his, in lieu of melody Liszt offers fragments of melody -- touching and beautiful, it may be, or passionate, or tinged with triviality; in lieu of a rational distribution of centers of harmony in accordance with some definite plan, he presents clever combinations of chords and ingenious modulations from point to point; in lieu of musical logic and consistency of design, he is content with rhapsodical improvisation. The power of persistence seems wanting. The musical growth is spoiled, the development of the themes is stopped, or prevented, by some reference to extraneous ideas. Everywhere the programme stands in the way. In much of Liszt's vocal music, particularly in the songs and choral pieces written to German words, an annoying discrepancy is felt to exist between the true sound of the words and the musical accents. The music is generally emotional, the expression direct and passionate; there is no lack of melodic charm and originality, yet the total effect is frequently disappointing.

In the choral numbers of the five masses, and in the oratorios Die Heilige Elisabeth and Christus, the rarity of fugal polyphony acts as a drawback. Its almost complete absence in some of these works makes for monotony and produces a sense of dullness, which may not be inherent in all the details of the music, but is none the less distinctly present. Father: Adam Liszt Wife: Marie d' Agoult (m. 1835 in Switzerland) Daughter: Blandine What Makes Franz Liszt Still Important? | The Public Domain Review ..or BROWSE BY TAG What Makes Franz Liszt Still Important? This week sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt. Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, explores what we can still learn from the life and music of Liszt. Marking anniversaries of the birth and death of historic figures, particularly in music, is somewhat akin to commemorating annually the date of death of family members.

It is never quite clear whether we are struggling to remember those to whom we were once close as we pursue our lives without them, all in an effort to assuage the guilt that comes with the natural tendency to forget, or whether we are indulging in a form of nostalgia, shaped in part by using the selective memory of the past to make claims about what our present and future lives ought to be but have seemingly little chance of becoming. And as we commemorate we rarely penetrate beneath the surface of received opinion, revising a set of inherited judgments. In our concert life these anniversaries become easy excuses to justify a comfortable and unexamined account of what history has bequeathed as “great” music. Marking the 100th or 200th anniversary rarely leads to a change in the concert repertory. We belabor the obvious. One might consider the Gustav Mahler centenary in 1960 as an exception since it took place at the beginning of a Mahler revival.

But the two-year extended Mahler remembrances that are justified by the 100th anniversary of his death (2011) and the 150th of his birth (2010) have functioned to ossify a sentimental historical portrait and further enshrine the central place Mahler’s music has in the orchestral repertory. The Four ages of Franz Liszt, as published in The Etude magazine, 1913. The case of Franz Liszt, who was born in 1811 and died in 1886, is more complex. Celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth ought to have been an opportunity to revisit a figure who helped define Romanticism, the role of the piano on the stage and in the home, and, most importantly, how music functions for most of the literate public. Yet our attention to him remains largely muted and ambivalent. Only a few of his works are still in the standard orchestral repertory — the piano concertos and one tone poem Les Preludes. Pianists bring out a few select works in recital, mostly to display the virtuosity they demand.

This is in stark contrast to Chopin, his contemporary, whom Liszt championed. The choral and organ music are never performed. If one compares this to Liszt’s output, not only for the piano, (which is gargantuan in scope), one cannot help but be struck by the obscurity that most of his music has fallen into. The last effort in a major city to revive Liszt’s music took place in New York in the 1970s under the leadership of Pierre Boulez. If we choose to remember Liszt more than in passing, it is as the legendary and charismatic personality he was, with all its complexities — his notorious love life, his turn to religion, his relationship with Richard Wagner and Wagner’s second wife, Liszt’s daughter Cosima. There never has been a better subject in music history for a Hollywood movie. He was classical music’s most successful, colorful, and long-lived superstar; he acquired and retained more groupies than any one before or since. Photograph of Franz Liszt taken in 1858, featured in Die berühmten Musiker by Lacroix Jean, Kunstverlag by Lucien Mazenod, 1946.

We may also choose to recall that he was likely the greatest and most facile pianist that ever lived and perhaps the most influential teacher of the instrument. Liszt’s pupils and their pupils dominated the musical landscape for generations. He defined the personality of the concert pianist, even though, ironically, Liszt gave up concertizing relatively early in his career. Perhaps we also acknowledge Liszt’s uncommon generosity to and support for his contemporary composers, from Chopin and Wagner to Grieg and Saint-Saëns, as well as his influence on a younger generation, including Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Jean Sibelius. As the bicentenary comes to a close without much ado, what have we missed? What indeed might we still learn and profit from taking a deeper and more comprehensive look at Liszt and his career? First, Liszt ought to remind us that our approach to music should not be dependent on some construct of nationality that helps prop up the popularity of a composer. Reputations in classical music after Beethoven seem increasingly dependent on nationalist enthusiasms. We seek Hungarians to perform Bartók, Russians Tchaikovsky, the English Elgar, the French Debussy, and Americans Copland and Ives.

Liszt defies this easy categorization. He was at one and the same time crucial to what we now regard as quintessentially Hungarian, German, and French. His reach as an artist and composer transcended national categories and reminds us of the limitations of nationalist appropriations and stereotypes. Top: Hungarian Stamp from 1961 celebrating 150th anniversary of Liszt's birth. Bottom: German stamp from 1996 celebrating the 100th anniversary of his death. Second, Liszt’s art bridged all genres. At the heart of his music for the piano was improvisation, an art sadly lost in what we now term classical music. Few, if any classical musicians can do it. Notation in his piano music sought to mirror an art that was spontaneous and tied to a moment of performance. His elaborations and fantasies for the piano based on the operatic works of others suggest many ways of freely adapting and altering music we like and wish to remember. The same can said for his transcriptions of works by Bach and Beethoven, where music written for one medium is translated into another.

Liszt’s piano versions of the Beethoven symphonies (Beethoven was a composer Liszt venerated and spent a lifetime advocating) were particular favorites of that brilliant eccentric, Glenn Gould. We musicians would be well served by following Liszt’s example by liberating ourselves from some delusive ideology of faithfulness to historic texts, adapting old and new music into the framework of our own new music, and altering it to reach a generation of listeners accustomed to new sounds and a novel acoustic environment. Liszt did that using the piano, and by so doing he helped create an enthusiastic audience of spectators. Third, Liszt pioneered in rendering music an art form connected to literature, painting, and narration. His notion that instrumental music can and should evoke character, landscape, plot, emotion, and ideas (for example in his tone poem Die Ideale, based on Schiller) laid the groundwork for what we now take for granted as the musical semantics and rhetoric we encounter in music for film and television. The magic in Liszt was that just music alone sufficed to spur the audience’s imagination. Playing Liszt and listening to his work reminds us of the power of music to tell and augment a story and evoke and embellish a memory.

This is particularly the case with respect to the connection between spirituality and religion and music, as Liszt’s late orchestral work From the Cradle to the Grave and his massive oratorio Christus make clear. Pastel impression of Liszt by the German artist Franz von Lenbach (1836–1904), ca. 1880, currently at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Fourth, Liszt was a tireless innovator, never content to repeat himself. Without Liszt’s experiments in the uses of harmony and sonority and the shape of musical form (for example, the stress on single melodies and motives and therefore imaginative repetition in works of considerable duration) much of late Romanticism and Modernism, particularly that associated with Wagner, would be unthinkable. He harbored few prejudices and was, to the end of his days, receptive to the work of younger composers and enthusiastic about new ideas — as his generous treatment of Russian composers amply suggests. We live in too segmented an environment, where the classical and the popular are still segregated, except for occasional all too facile efforts at so-called crossover works and events. Originality was just one of the goals Liszt pursued.

He borrowed happily from others and sought to integrate diverse influences into a synthetic and syncretic expressive musical art form. That expansive tendency helped lend him early on in his career as a composer the ill deserved reputation of being all too facile and superficial. Fifth, consistent with his adherence to improvisation and transcription, he defined interpretation as a creative act, even when performing a Beethoven sonata, as close to a “sacred” text as exists in the 19th-century piano literature. He added and subtracted, inserted transitions, and refashioned the meaning of historic masterpieces. Perhaps the best known is his adaptation of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy into a work for piano and orchestra. A more protean, gifted, generous, and versatile figure in music’s history can hardly be imagined, one who sought to keep the past alive and to link tradition with the contemporary. From Liszt we can learn that mere imitation and endless repetition of the same will not do and will condemn an art form to a form of living death.

Virtuoso par excellence that he was, he despised mere athleticism in music — the single-minded obsession with speed, accuracy, circuslike tricks, and above all, arbitrary affectation in the rendering of music, attributes that have come to define our contemporary concert life. He demanded that performance and composition be kept together and define the performing musician. And yet he reveled in the theater of performance, with lightness and irony. Photograph of Liszt in his music room in Weimar in 1884 - published in Modern Music and Musicians, University Society, New York, 1918 However, in order to gain the full measure of Liszt’s achievement and to benefit from his example far more of his music needs to be heard on the concert stage. Two great symphonic works, the Dante and Faust symphonies—although they have made periodic comebacks—need to be a regular part of the repertory. The same applies to the many orchestral tone poems, from Orpheus to Tasso.

And the great choral music (the Missa solennis and the 13th Psalm, for example) should return to active life and take their place alongside the Mozart Requiem and Handel’s Messiah. Last but not least, there is the endless treasure trove of piano music well beyond the Transcendental Etudes. Liszt was the first composer-performer to find ways, as a pianist and conductor, to reach a wide public, to make music accessible and enjoyable to more than a self-styled elite of connoisseurs. He did so by connecting music to the public’s wider interests, in poetry and prose, in politics, in history, and in art and religion. He wrote on music, including a biography of Chopin. He ran a court theater in Weimar where he gave the first performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin and Schumann’s Genoveva. He laid the foundations of Hungary’s modern musical life by founding Budapest’s conservatory. He used his fame and artistry on behalf of political and humanitarian causes.

What we can and must learn from Liszt is precisely what it means to be a musician, and to be, as a musician, at the center of a community’s political and cultural life, and to do so fearlessly, courageously, and generously. He set an example of what it requires to be, truly, a citizen of the world as a composer and performer, as one who broke rules and conventions to chart new paths. That was the message contained in Arnold Schoenberg’s 1911 centenary appreciation of Liszt. The very same exhortation needs repeating a century later. The difference is that in 1911 Liszt the composer had become largely derided. Today he is no longer controversial, just neglected.

Franz Liszt Fantasising at the Piano (1840) by Josef Danhauser - depicting Liszt playing in a Parisian salon on a grand piano made by Conrad Graf, who commissioned the painting; on the piano is a bust of Ludwig van Beethoven by Anton Dietrich; the imagined gathering shows seated Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Franz Liszt, Marie d'Agoult; standing Hector Berlioz or Victor Hugo, Niccolò Paganini, Gioachino Rossini; and a portrait of Byron on the wall. Leon Botstein is music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and conductor laureate of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. He is founder and coartistic director of the Bard Music Festival, which celebrates its 22nd season this year at Bard College, the institution he has served as president since 1975. He is the editor of The Musical Quarterly and the author of many articles and books. For his contributions to music he has received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.

He is a recipient of the Carnegie Foundation’s Academic Leadership Award and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Links to Works Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 – The Philadelphia Orchestra performing Stokowski’s orchestration. Recorded in 1926 and 1927. Download and more info from Internet Archive Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (part 1) – Performed by the Edison Concert Band in 1913. Download and more info from Internet Archive Concerto for Piano No.1 in E flat major – Antal Dorati conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Artur Rubinstein, pianist. Recorded in 1947. Allegro maestoso Franz Liszt Biography – Life of German Composer Nationality Humgarian Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer. He was also one of the foremost pianists of his generation as well as being an accomplished teacher and conductor. He helped a large number of other composers, including Berlioz and Wagner. Liszt was an important representative of the New German School, inventing the symphonic poem and introducing new developments in harmony. His work in transcribing existing music for piano also helped otherwise little-known music to become popular.

Early Life Liszt was born in the Hungarian town of Raiding on October 22, 1811. He was taught to play the piano by his musical father, to the extent that he was giving concerts by the age of nine and starting to compose his own pieces. His father, having obtained permission from his employer, Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, accompanied the young Franz to Vienna. The prodigy was supported by Antonio Salieri, who gave him free tuition in composition. The boy gave a succession of performances before prominent people in Vienna and became known for his ability to take a melody provided by a member of the audience and work it into a new composition. When he was 12 years old, Liszt was denied entry to the Paris Conservatory School on the grounds of nationality. Instead, his father arranged further private tuition, this time from Ferdinando Paer. It was at this point that the boy composed Don Sanche, his only opera. When his father died in 1826, Liszt – still only 15 – was hit very hard.

He lived with his mother in a small apartment in Paris, but found it difficult to such an extent that he lost much of his interest in music, instead throwing himself into studying religion and art. These subjects would later prove significant in his musical compositions. Liszt’s Adult Years In 1833, Liszt met and fell in love with the Comtesse Marie d”Agoult, and this helped to rekindle his interest in music. He wrote several pieces based on the countryside of Switzerland which eventually became the Années de Pèlerinage. The following year, he produced a set of piano compositions, plus three works he dubbed Apparitions. The combination of these new works and his impressive public concert performances gave casinos online a major boost to his reputation, and he became increasingly famous throughout Europe. Liszt was particularly well thought of because he was known to support a range of humanitarian and charitable causes, donating much of his concert income to them. In 1842, a serious fire devastated large areas of Hamburg. Liszt responded by holding several concerts in order to raise funds with which to help the city”s newly homeless people. Despite this public renown, however, his personal life had become unhappy.

He had three children with Marie d”Agoult, but the relationship eventually broke down. While he was in Kiev in 1847, Liszt met Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who urged him to call a halt to his tireless schedule of tours, and instead dedicate himself to composing and teaching. He agreed and gave his last paid concert that September, then going on to the princess”s Woronince estate for the winter. Later Years In 1848, the couple moved to the German city of Weima, where Liszt decided to work on a completely new musical form, the symphonic poem. This was an orchestral equivalent of an opera in that it brought together drama and music in the cause of representing a source from outside music, whether it was a painting, a story, or a poem. The new style was an immediate sensation, and pupils flocked to Weimar to ask for Liszt”s help in composing their own. Not everyone was so supportive, however, and there were almost as many detractors as fans. But Liszt”s pieces quickly became popular enough that they were performed in concert halls all over Europe.

Liszt”s son died in 1859 and his daughter three years later. He was also struggling professionally at this time: Brahms was the co-author of a manifesto attacking his work and that of the modernists who followed him. In 1860, Liszt went to Rome with the intention of marrying Carolyne, but her divorce papers were incomplete. Liszt was deeply upset and decided on a lonelier life for himself in a small monastic apartment near the city. Despite becoming a monk, he continued to compose: his music was played for the Hungarian coronation service in 1867. He also returned to giving regular piano lessons throughout the 1870s. His health declined markedly after a fall down a flight of stairs in 1881, and he died in Bayreuth on July 31, 1886. Leave a Reply Franz Liszt | Biography & History | AllMusic google+ Artist Biography by Michael Rodman Liszt was the only contemporary whose music Richard Wagner gratefully acknowledged as an influence upon his own.

His lasting fame was an alchemy of extraordinary digital ability -- the greatest in the history of keyboard playing -- an unmatched instinct for showmanship, and one of the most progressive musical imaginations of his time. Hailed by some as a visionary, reviled by others as a symbol of empty Romantic excess, Franz Liszt wrote his name across music history in a truly inimitable manner. From his youth, Liszt demonstrated a natural facility at the keyboard that placed him among the top performing prodigies of his day. Though contemporary accounts describe his improvisational skill as dazzling, his talent as a composer emerged only in his adulthood. Still, he was at the age of eleven the youngest contributor to publisher Anton Diabelli 's famous variation commissioning project, best remembered as the inspiration for Beethoven 's final piano masterpiece. An oft-repeated anecdote -- first recounted by Liszt himself decades later, and possibly fanciful -- has Beethoven attending a recital given by the youngster and bestowing a kiss of benediction upon him. Though already a veteran of the stage by his teens, Liszt recognized the necessity of further musical tuition.

He studied for a time with Czerny and Salieri in Vienna, and later sought acceptance to the Paris Conservatory. When he was turned down there -- foreigners were not then admitted -- he instead studied privately with Anton Reicha. Ultimately, his Hungarian origins proved a great asset to his career, enhancing his aura of mystery and exoticism and inspiring an extensive body of works, none more famous than the Hungarian Rhapsodies (1846-1885). Liszt soon became a prominent figure in Parisian society, his romantic entanglements providing much material for gossip. Still, not even the juiciest accounts of his amorous exploits could compete with the stories about his wizardry at the keyboard. Inspired by the superhuman technique -- and, indeed, diabolical stage presence -- of the violinist Paganini , Liszt set out to translate these qualities to the piano. As his career as a touring performer, conductor, and teacher burgeoned, he began to devote an increasing amount of time to composition.

He wrote most of his hundreds of original piano works for his own use; accordingly, they are frequently characterized by technical demands that push performers -- and in Liszt 's own day, the instrument itself -- to their limits. The "transcendence" of his Transcendental Etudes (1851), for example, is not a reference to the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, but an indication of the works' level of difficulty. Liszt was well into his thirties before he mastered the rudiments of orchestration -- works like the Piano Concerto No. 1 (1849) were orchestrated by talented students -- but made up for lost time in the production of two "literary" symphonies (Faust, 1854-1857, and Dante, 1855-1856) and a series of orchestral essays (including Les préludes, 1848-1854) that marks the genesis of the tone poem as a distinct genre. After a lifetime of near-constant sensation, Liszt settled down somewhat in his later years.

In his final decade he joined the Catholic Church and devoted much of his creative effort to the production of sacred works. The complexion of his music darkened; the flash that had characterized his previous efforts gave way to a peculiar introspection, manifested in strikingly original, forward-looking efforts like Nuages gris (1881). Liszt died in Bayreuth, Germany, on July 31, 1886, having outlived Wagner , his son-in-law and greatest creative beneficiary. Franz Liszt - Biography - IMDb Franz Liszt Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (1) | Trivia (2) Overview (4) 6' 1" (1.85 m) Mini Bio (1) Franz Liszt, the virtuoso pianist and composer, was the most famous concert superstar of the 19th century. He was born in what was then the Austrian Empire. His father was Hungarian and his mother was Austrian. At age 6 he took music lessons from his father, Adam Liszt, who worked at the Court of Count Esterhazy, the main sponsor of Liszt's education and career.

Liszt continued his music studies in Vienna under Carl Czerny and Antonio Salieri . In 1823, at the young age of 12, Liszt moved with his parents to Paris. There he enjoyed an early friendship with Frédéric Chopin , but later they became rivals. At that time young Liszt began his career of a travelling virtuoso. He was adulated all-over Europe, from Ireland to Russia. His concert performances included his own compositions, regarded by many as the most difficult piano music ever written. His elegant, worldly manners in combination with diabolic cynicism and his impressive stage presence and supernatural virtuosity gave cause for rumors, that he must have made a deal with the Devil. His "Mephisto Waltz" depicts the Devil playing a Paganini-style violin on the piano. Franz Liszt became a friend of many important cultural figures of his time. He attended the Paris premiere of the "Symphonie Fantastique" by Hector Berlioz and the two composers became good friends. Liszt shared mutual respect with Mikhail Glinka . He also admired Aleksandr Borodin and promoted his first symphony for performances in Western Europe.

Liszt was a friend of Richard Wagner , who was Liszt's son-in-law, until their differences led to cooler relationship in their later years. Liszt's influence on his fellow musicians was legendary. He made superb piano transcriptions of symphonies, operas and large orchestral works of other composers, such as Ludwig van Beethoven , Hector Berlioz , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Wagner . Operas and symphonies in Liszt's transcriptions became valuable repertoire of many pianists. Liszt lived and travelled with the married Countess Marie D'Agoult for 12 years and they had three children. In 1847, in Russia, Liszt met the beautiful and wealthy Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein, who soon left her husband for Liszt. In 1848 he became the Director of Music at the Court of Weimar. There, living with Carolyne in her mansion, he composed and revised his most important music, including the "Dream of Love", dedicated to Carolyne. The Church did not allow Liszt to marry Carolyne and also did not allow Carolyne to divorce Wittgenstein, with whom she had a daughter.

In 1861 Liszt settled in Rome where Carolyne bought a home and they tried to marry again, but the Church did not terminate Carolyne's marriage until her husband died in 1864. She then changed her mind and lived with unmarried Liszt, who was stuck in this painful situation until the end of his life. Under her influence, he became a religious man and in 1865 Pope admitted Liszt into Holy Orders and commissioned the church music. Since 1870s Liszt taught at the Budapest Conservatory and also participated with Wagner in several concert events in Bayreith. He spent his last years between Rome, Weimar, Budapest and Bayreuth, where he died in 1886. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Steve Shelokhonov Trivia (2) He eloped to Switzerland with Countess Marie d'Agoult. Their idealistic relationship eventually disintegrated in 1844. Together, Liszt and d'Agoult had three children: daughters Blandine (born 1835) and Cosima (born 1837), and son Daniel (born 1839).

Daniel died in 1859 at the tender age of 21. Liszt would write "Two Episodes from Lenau's Faust" and "Les Morts" to honour his memory. In 1862, his daughter Blandine died in childbirth. His other daughter, Cosima, later left her husband to be with composer Richard Wagner , to whom she bore daughters Isolde in 1865 and Eva in 1867 and son Siegfried in 1869 before they finally married in 1870. Pianist and composer Franz Liszt is born - Oct 22, 1811 - HISTORY.com Pianist and composer Franz Liszt is born Share this: Pianist and composer Franz Liszt is born Author Pianist and composer Franz Liszt is born URL Publisher A+E Networks Born on this day in 1811 in the Hapsburg Kingdom of Hungary, Franz Liszt would go on to make a name for himself not only as an important composer in the Romantic era, but also as one of the greatest pianists who ever lived.

In a career that spanned five eventful decades in classical-music history, his professional accomplishments alone would have made him a figure of historical significance, but his good looks and charisma, his effect on female audiences and his gossip-worthy romantic entanglements made him a figure somewhat larger than life. If it weren’t for the fact that rock and roll was still 140-plus years off in the future, it would be reasonable to call Franz Liszt the biggest rock star of his era. Born to a musician father employed in the service of a Hungarian prince, Liszt learned piano by the age of seven and was recognized shortly thereafter as a budding virtuoso. His musical education, paid for by a group of Hungarian noblemen, took place in Vienna. It was in Paris during his teens and early 20s, however, that Liszt first gained widespread public attention as a performer. Though his stature as a composer continued to grow throughout his long career, his reputation as a pianist both preceded and exceeded it.

Influenced most heavily not by another pianist but by the violinist Niccolò Paganini, Liszt developed a style that helped shape the future of piano technique, and he developed a following—particularly among women—that made him a massive concert draw throughout Europe at the height of his career in the 1840s and 50s. (It was no accident that director Ken Russell cast lead singer Roger Daltry of the Who in the role of Liszt in his 1975 film Lisztomania.) Away from the piano, Liszt also conducted a number of high-profile and often controversial affairs over course of his career, beginning with a student who was also the daughter of high-ranking French government official and continuing through several famous dancers, a French countess and a Polish princess. Widely believed to have fathered many children out of wedlock, Liszt famously denied one such paternity claim by writing, “I know his mother only by correspondence, and one cannot arrange that sort of thing by correspondence.” Franz Liszt died of pneumonia on July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Bavaria. Related Videos

Question: What was the nationality of composer Franz Liszt?
Answer: Hungarian